Websites are an essential part of marketing for a practicing artist, and while dealing with --all things computer-- may seem daunting at times, perfecting your website could have a huge impact on your sales. For those new to the online agenda, I've listed a few pointers that I found particularly useful while rounding out my website and online portfolio.

SEO or search engine optimization, is a term used in marketing to refer to the method in which you design your site to have high relevancy in search engines. This means that you design the content and layout of your website so that the search engine programs will list your site higher in search results.

Keywords and SEO

When looking at artists websites I tend to favor the simpler ones that emphasis the art rather than fancy graphics or text. In reality, if you want traffic for you site solely from web surfing, good text content is essential. Keywords, what you search in web browsers such as google, are gathered from text content. Without effective keywords that describe your work or you as an artist, it will be difficult for your target audience to find you online. Keywords include anything from: sculpture, ceramic sculpture, pottery, or ceramic artist to things like, southeastern, upstate South Carolina, or feminist art. Keywords should be somewhat specific, think about what people would search for to find your work. These keywords should be used in the content of your website, and think about different ways of rephrasing them. Of course I understand that in many cases it may be difficult to write keywords into your website content. That leads to our next topic, Blogs.

Blogs

One of the biggest things that will kill your SEO is to have a website that remains static, or doesn't have new content added often. As an artist, I realize that it is important to have a clean website that stays fairly consistent because your artwork is the focus. You want your portfolio, CV, and contact info to be easy to access and navigate. This makes it difficult to frequently have new content. One great way to get around this is to have a blog. Blogs are designed specifically for regular content and news, and allow posts to be organized by date and topic. Blogs will also allow you to use your cache of keywords and related topics, driving more people to your website. They will also pull in audience members that may not be looking for your kind of work but may still have an interest in it. I encourage you write on a diverse range of topics that will appeal to fellow art lovers.

I also strongly encourage you to have your blog directly linked to your domain name if possible, that way any views on it are directly associated with your site and will give your site better SEO. Either way there should be clear links between them.

Link love <3

One thing that is a major contributor to SEO, that is commonly overlooked, is links. Effective, legitimate, and popular links are factored into how your website is rated in search engines. Linking to websites related to you work, that your users will enjoy, is a great way to signal to seach engines that your website has good content. Blogs are a great place to provide links because their content is so flexible. It is also important that other legitimate websites link to you. Getting other popular sites to link to yours will increase your legitimacy.

Social media is a great way to provide a large variety of popular links. Linking content from your website to your facebook page, or twitter or whatever, will create good links that search engines will pick up on because facebook users will follow those links to your site. Linking to other related artists and businesses through social media will create an effect network of links for your site.

No Flash

As artists we often feel it is necessary to make things visually interesting or impressive, especially to outshine the competition. One way that many choose to accomplish this, is to make their website have special graphics or movements. The way this is most often achieved is through designing the site through flash instead of html coding. This is not an effective way to build a commerce site because the search engines are not able to read it. Basically this means that normally, for html coding, any text you write is written in the code of the website and is visible to search engines, but in flash, it is not, therefor keywords are not effective.

Deleting pages

As our careers (hopefully) move forward, we will begin to change what we want others to see on our websites. We will naturally then want o remove things that no longer fit with our image. Unfortunately deleting pages will lead to 404 errors. This means that a search engine has already mapped this page on your site and is referring people to it, but since the page no longer exists, it gets an error. This is bad, first because it irritates potential customers, and secondly because search engines will reduce your relevance if you have a lot of 4o4 errors. Make sure to avoid deleting pages, and instead just move content around. While I do not consider this to be a crucial thing, since the scale of your website as an artist will be quite small, it is good to keep it in mind while working on your website.